


Vanishing point

by laughingpineapple



Category: Chess (Board Game)
Genre: Chess, Gen, Magical Realism, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21937939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Descriptive chess grammar.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Vanishing point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruis/gifts).



The reason for my visit to Maya and Gersten fades into irrelevance. I remember J. suggesting I consult them for my semiotics paper, swearing by the presence in their library of rare transcripts of de Saussure’s lectures. I also remember the cassette that P. had long tried to get back from her ex and which had reportedly, circumstantially made its way to their home, and how the noble bond of friendship had made me volunteer to act as a broker.

No matter. To linger on such causes exposes the two women to the indignity of being painted with unearned ordinariness.

What does matter is that, having made an appointment, I rang at their door. Finding it open, I took a step into their house and found it tasteful, lived-in, soft lines and bright colors filling that flat with passion, a beating heart in the middle of a bleak high rise near the edge of the city.

I first saw the pieces as I lingered near the doorstep. A chiseled knight lay on the floor. A simple plastic rook, tournament standard, stood on the edge of a shelf like a lookout tower abandoned in ages past. Nearby, a long row of black pawns joined together small travel sets and two bigger metal casts. Chess pieces dotted the apartment, more and more details revealing themselves to a mindful observer. Another pawn was entrenched in an ashtray, looking thankful, I thought, for the added defense afforded by its walls. The scenario brought a smile to my lips, suggesting perhaps a child, who, unaware of the rules of the noble game, had taken to deploying the pieces like tin soldiers. Nonetheless, even then I could feel the glimpse of a rigorous method behind their positioning. A truth, perhaps. Such heavy words ring hollow now, far from the apartment, but their echo persists.

Chess is a language onto itself, this fact is known to anyone who has ever spent as little as an hour on a game (as well as the occasional semiotician – De Saussure himself posited that “The respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all the other terms”). Within the walls of the apartment, that language’s grammar has been pulled and stretched, its drift as deep and monumental as that of the continents along their fault lines. What hides in these new spaces they created, what subtleties, what meanings? As I try to picture Maya and Gersten’s daily trifles, a feat for the imagination since, as stated above, mundaneness appears to shun them, there must be a time when one tells the other to turn down the volume of the radio, or leaves a note that they are out of butter. Maya in her red shawls may convey certain meanings through her knitting needles; Gersten, as P. once told me, puts on her brooches according to patterns known to her alone. At times her enamel soothsaying becomes apparent to the people around her. Most days it remains a well-kept secret. What, then, is left to chess? What can better be conveyed – rather, what can _only_ be conveyed – through a rook placed at the end of the couch? Does it hold a mute dialogue with the one on the shelf, with the knight by the entrance, is their positioning relative to each other, to the magnetic pole, to unseen constellations? Is there more meaning to be found in the overlapping of more sets of pieces across the apartment, perhaps a stratification, a function of time that shows that what was once an antique pawn has kept progressing throughout history, generations of pawns until a contemporary design (more of a cone, in truth, only interpretable as a chess piece by virtue of the other chess pieces around it) is finally, achingly close to promotion to queen? Yet the apartment remains timeless in my memory’s eyes. I suspect their connections, for surely those connections exist, to be more copious and deeper than a single scenario repeated through time, rather a transcendent conversation of coexisting forms, placements and purposes. Those criss-crossed threads create a thick tapestry whose patterns I have not traveled far enough to see.

In the middle of the living room stood three small tables, upon which three chessboards showed three games at different stages. One was in its opening phase, a Semi-Slav defense, if memory serves. Another had reached a rook and pawn ending, in a belabored fashion, as these things often go. The last one saw a heated middlegame where two doubled pawns may or may not have spelled white’s doom in spite of light material advantage.

A bishop from this third chessboard was the only piece removed from either game which still stood next to it – perfectly in line, I now suspect, with the a2-g8 diagonal: Bj11, if you will. I took it in my hands to admire its craftmanship and the finer details of its design. Solid wood. Weighed. Elegant geometry.

It was then that Maya and Gersten walked into their living room, carrying the small envelope which I had come to collect and which still lies discarded in the back of my car, unopened. They moved following a rhythm of their own, as if the other were an extension of their self, but I could not decipher whether the bond between them was one of friendship, love or enmity, or any other declension of human bonds which may lead two people to adopt the thirty-two pieces as their alphabet and grammar.

“Did we not hear a _j’adoube_?” said Gersten.

“What?” said I, bishop still in hand, not so out of touch with my French as not to understand the international call for touching a piece without intending to move it, but in disbelief upon hearing a formal rule invoked in that context.

“Your move, then,” said Maya.

My move.

The diagonal stretches to the horizon on its unwavering grid. The apartment is far gone in my rear view mirror; the city will soon follow suit. In the glove compartment, nothing but sunglasses, my wallet and the bishop. Something is changing. The drift deepens.


End file.
